[martythemaniak]

It is well understood that history not a nice, neat, little linear progression. It is full of stop and starts, stagnation, dizzying S-curves, revolutions, backlashes and regressions.

Apollo was a wonder, yes an outgrowth of the arms race, but also a manifestation of a purposeful and unified nation that just doesn't exist today. It was unsustainable, but it was also very long time ago.

I find your views that "things are hard, so we shouldn't do that, and we should never get off this planet" unfortunately common. Here's two things to consider:

- Sending people to space is not just fancy. Today's robotic missions are like trying to fill a swimming pool with a pipette. In 7 years Curiosity has driven a total of 8.6km - an slow afternoon stroll for a person. Every single little action is planned and executed at an excruciatingly slow pace. Nothing can be fixed or adjusted. InSight ran into a rock and now it might not be able to burrow it's instrument down. Digging down 3m might prove too much for that robot, a trivial task for any human.

- If humans don't have outward goals, we're much more likely to just look inward and spend our collective energy tearing each other apart. Without looking outwards, the entire Earth will become one giant vapid high school.

[idlewords]

Apollo was not the product of a 'purposeful and unified nation'. The period 1961-1972 was one of the most politically turbulent in American history, to an extent we forget today. Politically motivated bombings were routine news! Apollo was the product of its time in interesting ways, but let's not deceive ourselves about America in 1969 being any more unified and purposeful than it is today.

I have nothing against doing hard things, but I think sending people to Mars is a hard, dumb thing, and that the money for that will be better spent on mechanized probes to more interesting places (like Ganymede or Europa) along with space telescopes. Other people feel differently!

But I am tired of the amount of special pleading in this debate. Everything is hard on Mars, because it is on Mars. Antarctica has water and all the air you can breathe, and yet we can barely function there. If we send people to Mars, it will be a one-shot deal like Apollo was, and then all the space nerds will be sad again. Better to fund robots at 1/10 of the level of a manned mission, and get to explore the entire solar system instead. If people are dead set on humanity having a 'backup plan', then the Moon is right next door and we can even set it up with wifi.

[TeMPOraL]

> Better to fund robots at 1/10 of the level of a manned mission, and get to explore the entire solar system instead.

The unfortunate reality is, once people settle for this, the 1/10 will get cut to 1/1000 because "all you do is send robots to dead rocks". Funding science isn't sexy these days.

> If people are dead set on humanity having a 'backup plan', then the Moon is right next door and we can even set it up with wifi.

For some x-risks Moon may be just a bit too close. I understand that the x-risk avoidance argument is a niche one, though. IMO we should absolutely do the Moon - and then Mars or Venus (or both).